


Come Tomorrow, Feel No Pain

by VioletIsabelleLovett



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, F/M, Goodbye Stranger, Human Castiel, Human Meg, Human Megstiel, Megstiel - Freeform, One Shot, Sad, Song Lyrics, Supernatural - Freeform, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 07:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2380496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletIsabelleLovett/pseuds/VioletIsabelleLovett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps in another life, they would at least get to say goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Tomorrow, Feel No Pain

The hospital wasn’t really like he had imagined-- if he was going to be honest with himself, Castiel didn’t know what he had been expecting. Not the bleakness, the white of the painted walls to blind him with their blank stares. The noise was constant, although not dreary and depressing as he would have thought. It was just noise, noise to fill the silence, between the talking patients, the beeping and telephones ringing, and the TV playing some sitcom from the 1980’s. He expected emotion, at the very least. Sadness. Maybe despair. Maybe, if he was crazy enough, a glimmer of hope. But it was just noise, noise to fill the silence, and noise that made it hard to think.

Even in her hospital room, it was noisy. But it was better than being in the waiting room. The beeping of her monitors, the soft hush of voices from the doctors and nurses outside. Her soft, fragile breathing was enough to make his head spin, now that it was no longer accompanied by the sound of her voice, her laugh, or her smiles.

It was cancer, the doctors had said. Simple as that. Not uncommon these days. Except they had caught it too late, and now, it was untreatable. The same story the doctors had probably told a thousand and ten other patients before him. Their sympathetic gazes only made Castiel feel like his world was crashing down around him even more. They didn’t know, they didn’t care. She was just another patient.

Love had passed between them like the breeze of mid-June passed through open windows on a warm night. Softly, delicately, and then with warmth and smiles. Not unlike so many other couples, they loved in the privacy of their apartment, as well as with smiles and with gentle touches on the street corners at midday. He was the religious studies teacher, and she had been a drifter, a writer and a poet who had been struggling to get by. He had always teased her, that she never fit the true “profile” of a poet; she was always so sharp-tongued, sarcastic and witty, enough to make most men shrink away from her over-confidence that often superseded the tenderness that she had shown him in the years they had been together. The tenderness she only ever reserved for him, and him alone.

When they dated, she was the unlikely poet. When they made love, she was the galaxy among the void of space that until now occupied his life.

Her tongue was sharp, and her words were as kind and as gentle as her touches. Until the cancer broke down every will her body had left to give beauty into his life again.

It wasn’t bad, at first. And then it was. The day-trips to the beaches grew less and less, and their walks in the city at night grew shorter and shorter as each week dragged on past. Her body wasn’t held as high as it once was, and her poetry became darker and more cynical, until it stopped altogether

But Castiel willed himself not to dwell on the darker memories now, as he sat beside her beeping monitor as the hollow, bone-thin girl laid asleep on the bed beside him. The girl with the sharp tongue and gentle words.

On their day trips to the beach, they would play their favorite song, blasting it over the CD player in their old Buggy until their ears threatened to give out. ‘Goodbye Stranger,’ the one song the both of them could hear over and over again without ever getting bored. She would tease him when he could never sing the high notes, and he would just laugh and laugh.

_Goodbye stranger_   
_It’s been nice_   
_Hope you find your paradise_

Over and over again they would sing, until they reached the sandy shores of the New Jersey beach. She would sit and write poetry on the sand, and he would splash in the water, bringing her shells and bits of seaweed to put in her hair. And later, she would join him.

But now the beeping of the monitor was a harsh claw, digging into his skin and dragging him back into the face of reality. As she got sicker, they eventually stopped the beach visits all together. She only had the energy to walk into the bathroom anymore. He brought her meals and drinks, and helped wash her thick, brown hair, until the chemotherapy rid her of it forever.

They had already said their goodbyes when they found that she would not have much longer. They spent the day together, watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” on the tiny box-television they were able to afford inside their apartment. Castiel would make her laugh by quoting all of the angel Clarence’s lines as he said them, and she would mess his hair and kiss his cheek. Tell him that he was her angel, just like Clarence. But when the laughing turned to coughing, and the coughing to choking, everything seemed to slow down. Time. His oxygen intake. The ambulance, even, seemed to take a millennia to arrive.

The oxygen tubes, the monitors, the paramedics. All were noisy and loud and jarring in his ears, and yet all he could hear was her labored, gargled breathing as her body began to convulse, over and over again. Sedating her was only temporary-- it would not last long. Her body would not be able to handle another seizure.

Sitting beside her in the hospital, now, was like watching a clock tick away the hours of her life. When the sedation would wear off, her chances of survival would be next to nothing. So he waited. He held her hand. He smiled at her and talked to her, even though she couldn't hear him. He told her about the time he had draped her in seaweed, and she looked like some kind of monster. About the time he splashed water on her poetry book on accident, and she had slapped him, and then laughed for an hour straight. About showing her the ocean for the first time, and the last.

And when the monitor began picking up speed, and the beeping intensified, he stopped talking. He sang, instead, even when the doctors rushed in and her body began convulsing, her breathing once again becoming labored and heavy and uneven. The monitor was going wild, but he only sat there, singing quietly, sure if she could hear him that she would know everything would be okay. He couldn’t hit the high notes. She would laugh and tease him and sing them herself in her own, wonderful out-of-key voice. And everything would be okay.

“ _Goodbye stranger_  
 _It’s been nice_  
 _Hope you find your paradise_ …”

They tried to restart her heart. Once, twice, and again.

“ _Hope your dreams will all come true_ …”

They stopped. It was quiet. But he couldn’t see the monitors, or the doctors, or the bed where she now laid still. He only saw her stretched across the sand, hat on her head, peering at her book of poetry through wide sun glasses. He didn’t hear the monitor flatline. He only heard the waves, in and out, in and out…

But that wasn’t real, not anymore. She was gone, and he was crying. Begging with the doctors to save her. And then they were pulling him out of her hospital room, away from the monitors and the oxygen tanks and the doctors and the sound, and away from her forever.

_Will we ever meet again?_

He would recover, in time. Time heals all wounds, as the saying went, and even eventually, it healed his. He visited her grace sometimes. Sometimes with flowers, sometimes with his MP player, playing different versions or variations of their favorite song. First, he looked at the memories with sadness. And then with a smile. They had said their goodbyes, and it hadn’t been in the blank, madness of the hospital. It had been in the comfort of their home, where tears and laughter could pour freely from their eyes and open mouths, as easily and willingly as the kisses and tender caresses.

_Feel no sorrow, feel no shame._

And with content in his heart, after many months and even years of suffering, he too would live on, without and within her, living life to be happy as she would want for him.

_Come tomorrow, feel no pain._

 

**Author's Note:**

> The song featured in this fic was written by Supertramp. For anyone who does not know, it was the song at the very end of 8x17, "Goodbye Stranger", the episode where Meg died.


End file.
